Jason König
How did the Greek literature of the Roman Empire relate to its cultural and political context, and to the changes and challenges faced by the Greek-speaking populations of the Roman world?
One immediate problem is the difficulty of deciding where Imperial Greek literature begins and ends. Usually the Imperial period is defined roughly as 31 BCE (the year of Augustus’ victory at the Battle of Actium, which set him on the path to being first emperor of Rome) to 312 CE (the conversion of the emperor Constantine to Christianity). However, many of the features we see as central to Imperial Greek literature are visible well outside the chronological boundaries of that period. Some of the most important Greek writers of the reign of Augustus were active well before Actium – for example the historian Diodorus Siculus, who seems to have completed most of his work between about 60 and 30 BCE – and the encounter between Greek intellectuals and Roman patrons in the late Republic made a formative contribution to concerns which were central to Greek literature throughout the following centuries: Greek identity, the Greek past, the relationship between Greece and Rome (e.g., see Schmitz and Wiater 2011). At the other end of the chronological spectrum, the rhetorical works of Libanius and some of his contemporaries from the mid-fourth century have a great deal in common with the sophistic activity which had flourished in the second and early third centuries. Early Christian literature throughout the first four or five centuries CE had a close, albeit highly ambivalent relationship with Greco-Roman traditions (see Stenger, ch. 8, in this volume). Moreover, the Imperial period as defined above is itself very far from uniform. After the reign of Augustus very little Greek literature survives at all before the late first century CE. Nor is there much surviving after the beginning of the so called “third-century crisis” – five decades of military and political upheaval that affected the whole of the empire – in 235 CE.
We can narrow things by focusing in on the remarkable and distinctive intensification of literary activity which took place throughout the long second century, roughly from the work of Dio Chrysostom and Plutarch, whose early writing dates, in both cases, from the 70s and 80s CE, through to the work of Philostratus, some of which was written as late as the 230s. It is a common procedure to treat this sub-period as a more or less coherent unit. It was a time of great generic innovation, above all in prose genres. For example it saw the development of the novel form (although our earliest example, Chariton’s Chaireas and Callirhoe, may have been written earlier, perhaps in the mid first century CE), along with various other examples of experimentation in prose fiction and new approaches to biographical writing. We also see a new scale and a new adventurousness in compilatory styles of writing which included miscellanistic and encyclopaedic compositions as well as more conventional works on technical, scientific and geographical subjects (see König and Whitmarsh 2007; also Morgan 2011 for claims about the importance of the miscellany as one of the most important genres of the Roman Empire). Perhaps most strikingly of all, display oratory gained a new prominence and prestige, and the great Greek orators of the Roman Empire, the sophists, gained fame and fortune for their ability to improvise speeches on themes drawn from classical history.
For reasons of space, most of what I have to say here will focus on that extraordinarily fertile century and a half: I look first at the intellectual culture of the long second century; then at the life of the Greek cities and the way in which that left its mark on the Greek literature of this period; and finally at the impact of Rome and the Roman empire. However, it is important to stress that a full account would have to follow that story much more painstakingly through the century or two before and after. That is an area where much work still remains to be done.
The Imperial Greek obsession with the Classical past has not always appealed to modern taste. It had a very bad press in the late nineteenth century and right through the first half of the twentieth century and beyond, associated with derivativeness and nostalgia. In the last few decades we have begun to appreciate the works of this period more on their own terms, and to understand how the Greek authors of the Roman world treated literary creativity as something perfectly compatible with, even dependent upon imitation of the Classical past. They reshaped and defamiliarized their classical models – not least by putting them into prose, in the case of the pre-Imperial poetic heritage – at the same time as celebrating them.
Crucially, this kind of mastery of the literary and linguistic heritage was a powerful instrument of self-presentation for the Greek elites (as Schmitz 1997 has shown). The authors of this period tended to put a great deal of energy into crafting authoritative personas for themselves on paper, and ingenious quotation and adaptation of Classical quotations and Classical models often contributed to that goal, as a way of displaying apparently effortless familiarity with a shared literary archive. Reference to earlier literature was often combined with a sophisticated command of Attic dialect (although some authors went out of their way to reject what they portrayed as excessively pedantic adherence to “Atticism” – Galen and Lucian are the obvious examples, both discussed further below – and in practice Attic dialect seems to have been used in a more relaxed fashion than we sometimes assume: see Kim 2010). Being able to deliver a speech in the language of Demosthenes or to quote ingeniously from Homer when appropriate was a badge of high social status not just in literary writing, but also in the day-to-day life of the Greek elites. Admittedly, not all members of the elite would have attained those skills to the same degree. Most men from educated families would have studied language and literature with a grammarian as well as undergoing some rhetorical training. These highly conservative traditional schooling processes must have brought only a relatively superficial understanding of literary culture for some. Nevertheless, the ideal of a hyper-educated elite was a very powerful one. The experts – the virtuoso sophists who toured around the empire giving display speeches – were iconic representatives of the intelligence and erudition of the educated class as a whole; it was almost as though they displayed those qualities so that other members of the elite would not need to (Schmitz 1997, 63–6).
Perhaps not surprisingly, given the prestige of these skills, their ownership was debated. The intellectual culture of the Roman Empire was highly adversarial. This was a culture where contests in musical and poetic and rhetorical skills were a prominent part of the agonistic festivals that were spread right across the Mediterranean world, most famously at the four-yearly Pythian festival at Delphi but also at hundreds of other smaller events. Those competitive practices were replicated in other kinds of public intellectual display and even within the more private arena of the written text. The most famous and most competitive intellectuals of all were the sophists. The most important evidence for their activity comes from the work of Philostratus, whose work dates from the first half of the third century CE, so rather later than most of the other authors discussed here. He seems to have had a career in sophistic oratory himself, although he also wrote a wide range of non-rhetorical works (including a life of the wonder-working philosopher Apollonius of Tyana, who was active in the late first century CE). His Lives of the Sophists (VS) gives a lengthy account of his sophistic predecessors and contemporaries from the previous century and a half. Throughout that work he depicts competitiveness almost as a defining feature of sophistic identity (see König 2010). He portrays the sophists denouncing their rivals, taking sides against each other and competing for imperial favor. Often his comments imply something approaching admiration. For example he talks about the quarrel between Favorinus and Polemo as follows: “They may be forgiven for their philotimia (“ambition”, “ambitious rivalry”), since human nature views ambition as something which never grows old” (VS 1.8, 490); and a few lines later of Favorinus: “For those who called Favorinus a sophist precisely this fact – that he had quarreled with a sophist – was sufficient proof, for that spirit of ambition of which I have spoken here is usually directed against rivals from the same profession” (1.8, 491). There are even traces in the work of Philostratus’ own involvement in professional rivalry.
There are similar examples from countless other texts and genres. One obvious example is the medical writer Galen. Galen was active in the mid-second century CE. He came from Pergamon in Asia Minor, but much of his career was spent in Rome, where he had links with the imperial family. He was astonishingly prolific: much of his writing does not survive, but what we have fills 22 lengthy volumes in the standard nineteenth-century edition, and covers all branches of ancient medicine, along with a large number of non-medical topics too. He was a hugely influential figure for post-Classical medicine into the seventeenth century and even beyond, but also clearly won great prestige during his own lifetime. One of the ways in which he did so was through repeated disparagement of his intellectual rivals, often in quite unforgiving terms: other doctors who do not match his own intellectual rigor, as he represents it; and representatives of other professions like athletic trainers (see König 2005, 254–300). The latter might seem at first sight like a surprising target, but Galen’s concerns make more sense when we see how they are represented as encroaching on Galen’s own territory of medical expertise. The ancient world had nothing resembling medical or other scientific qualifications. That was a major factor in the adversarial quality of the intellectual life of the Roman Empire in some disciplines: rhetoric was the most powerful vehicle available for the establishment of authority, and experts often attempted to disparage rivals as a way of proving their own competence (see Barton 1994). Athletics was also an educational rival to other more intellectual pursuits: the gymnasium was one of the major institutions of higher education in the world, used to train young men of the elite as “ephebes,” between the ages of 17 and 19 in military and athletic skills. That educational role is presumably another factor in Galen’s criticisms, given his desire to stamp out anything that interferes with training of the mind.
In other cases we even see the Imperial Greek elite playing at competition in more relaxed environments. The work of Plutarch is full of examples. Plutarch lived between about 50 and 120 CE, and spent much of his life in the small town of Chaironeia in Boiotia, northwest of Athens. He is best known for his biographical work the Parallel Lives, which compares famous Greeks and Romans. But he was above all a philosopher, and he left in addition a vast corpus of broadly philosophical essays known as the Moralia. A number of these texts are dialogues set in the present day, with appearances by Plutarch’s friends and contemporaries. Between them they give a very vivid glimpse of intellectual life in the late first and early second centuries, and show in particular the importance of competitive debate even in the context of informal social interaction. In his Sympotic Questions (QC), for example, he recreates a series of nearly 100 dinner-party conversations from across his lifetime. He and his fellow guests playfully debate often quite abstruse topics of literary and scientific interest as if practicing, in a low-key setting, the skills of rhetorical and philosophical argumentation they use with more at stake in other areas of their lives. And a large number of their discussions are set at the Pythian and other festivals: Plutarch hints that the skills he and his fellow guests are displaying are more elevated equivalents of the agonistic skills on display in the festival competitions (see König 2012, 60–89).
Admittedly intellectual rivalry is not presented in an unequivocally positive fashion in these texts – there are plenty of signs of ambivalence. Philostratus includes many examples of competitive behavior which he suggests go beyond what is acceptable (e.g., see VS 1.21, 514–15). Galen criticizes the athletic trainers in part precisely because of their excessively combative behavior in debate (e.g., see Ad Thras. 46, K 5.895): presumably his point is that their indulgence in disputation lacks the thoughtful, measured quality of his own. Plutarch and his fellow guests make it clear that too much competitiveness and conflict are inappropriate for what he calls the “friend-making” character of the symposium (e.g., see QC 1.4, especially the closing statement at 622b). And more generally speaking Plutarch and other philosophically inclined writers (e.g., see Epictetus, Discourses 3.25.1–5, with Long 2002, 195–6) tend to stress the importance of competition with the self, rather than glory-seeking competition with others. Some of those views anticipate – although in relatively muted form – the more pronounced wariness of debate and disputation which became increasingly common in early Christian and late antique culture (see Lim 1995).
As these examples suggest, the intellectual relationships of mutual admiration and rivalry, the institutions of education, display and debate, were not just the context for Imperial Greek literature; they were also in some respects its main topic. Some writers, like Plutarch and Philostratus, celebrate intellectual accomplishment, in the works just mentioned. Others, like Galen, take a more sceptical approach. The most famous sceptic of all is the satirical writer, Lucian. We know less about Lucian’s life than for many of his contemporaries: for some reason he seems to have been a less prominent figure in the Greek intellectual culture of the Roman world. But from his own work it is clear that he grew up in the city of Samosata in the Roman province of Syria, in what is now southeast Turkey (Greek may not even have been his first language). He is likely to have lived between about 120 and 180 CE. He seems to have had rhetorical aspirations early in his career, but later took a more unconventional course, innovating in a number of different literary forms, most importantly in using the dialogue tradition inherited from Plato for his own distinctively satirical purposes. Lucian is fascinated by the inherent absurdities and contradictions of the Greek literary heritage, which is treated with such reverence by his contemporaries, although he also simultaneously celebrates that heritage through his own ingenious rewriting of it (see Branham 1989). His favorite target is fake intellectuals, especially those who describe themselves as philosophers but without having the necessary integrity and the necessary erudition, and who treat philosophy as a commodity, prizing display and profit above truth and morality (see Whitmarsh 2001, 247–94). In all of this Lucian plays on his position as a cultural outsider: he hints repeatedly that his outsider’s gaze gives him a kind of special authority to comment on Greek culture. That pose owes a great deal to motifs of philosophical self-representation. It is quite common for ancient philosophical writers to express concern about the misguided character of contemporary society, and contemporary intellectual culture in particular, and to separate themselves from it. Galen, who saw himself as a doctor as well as a philosopher, is once again a helpful parallel for Lucian: quite frequently he expresses his despair at the intellectual failings of his peers in general terms (e.g., On the Order of My Own Books 1, K19.50–52), as well as criticizing named individuals. Lucian is different, however. In many of his works he does indeed take on a philosophical persona as a vehicle for his satire, but he also delights in showing how that persona is just as much at risk of criticism as those he criticizes.
One classic example is his great pair of “anti-biographies” on religious/philosophical charlatans, the Peregrinus and the Alexander. In both of these works he makes it clear that his own ostensibly respectable narrating persona has a mastery of the techniques of trickery which matches or even surpasses that of his subjects (see König 2006 on the Peregrinus). At other times he turns the attention on us as readers. For example his work On Salaried Posts (De merc. cond.) describes the humiliations experienced by a Greek intellectual employed in a Roman household. Many of Lucian’s portrayals of fake philosophers are couched in deliberately non-realistic language drawn from the traditions of comedy and set in the distant past. But this work is set very much in the present day: it punctures the pretensions of the unnamed intellectual in painfully realistic detail. Remarkably, it is in the second person singular and in the present tense. Ostensibly that second-person usage is directed to a specific addressee, who is being invited to imagine the fate which might await him if things go badly, but it is hard to avoid the impression that all of Lucian’s readers are being implicated in his criticisms as they read: “The servants stare at you, all the guests watch your every move, nor does the host himself ignore these things, but he has actually instructed some of his servants to watch how you look at his wife or his concubines .... The attendants of the other guests … mock at your inexperience. As one would expect, you sweat from confusion and you do not dare to drink even when you are thirsty, in case you are viewed as a drunkard” (De merc. cond. 15). One of Lucian’s great talents, in other words, is to show us how difficult it is to escape from what he represents as the dominant failings of Imperial Greek intellectual culture – ostentation, pretension, fakery, greed, petty rivalry. Even his narrator figures and implied readers are often at risk.
One of the other defining characteristics of the intellectual life of the Roman Empire was its cosmopolitan quality. Philostratus’ Lives of the Sophists is a case in point. The imaginative geography of this text is fascinating and understudied (but see now Kemezis 2011). The action jumps around between many different parts of the Mediterranean world, in a way which reflects the geographical richness and connectedness of the Roman Empire. In many of his mini-biographies Philostratus records the sophists’ close links with several different cities – usually the cities of their birth, and cities they have become particularly associated with as citizens and benefactors later in life. It is also striking, however, that, many of them ultimately take a rather stand-offish stance in relation to the day-to-day political life of these communities, as if their identity as members of a cosmopolitan, empire-wide intellectual elite is what matters to them most of all. Niketes of Smyrna, the first of the Roman-period sophists mentioned by Philostratus (see further in the section following) is a case in point:
He was thought worthy of great honor by the city of Smyrna, which left nothing unsaid in shouting out its praises of him, viewing him as an amazing man and a great orator. But he seldom came forward to speak in the Assembly, and when the people accused him of being afraid he said, “I fear the people when they are exalting me more than when they abuse me.” (VS 1.19, 511)
There is accordingly a tendency for the bulk of the action to concentrate in a few locations only – the really big intellectual centers like Athens or Rome or Smyrna. For all the geographical richness of the work, it tends to be quite cursory in its mention of less intellectually prominent cities. Much the same is true in Plutarch’s Sympotic Questions: the conversations are spread over a very wide range of cities right across the Mediterranean world, sometimes set at symposia associated with sacrificial feasts as part of local festivals, hosted by local civic officials. To that extent the Sympotic Questions celebrates the local, civic identities of the Imperial Greek world. It is also striking, however, that these local identities ultimately get only quite cursory attention, in the opening sentences of each chapter: what matters most, in the end, is the atmosphere of harmony and shared intellectual endeavor between members of the educated elite from many different communities, as they launch into erudite conversations on subjects drawn from the pan-Greek heritage.
The Greek authors of the Roman Empire, in other words, often set themselves at one remove from the day-to-day life of the city. Nevertheless civic culture was both a major subject and a major shaping force for Imperial Greek literature. That is perhaps not surprising given the situation on the ground. The cities of the Greek world were for the most part flourishing and wealthy right through the long second century CE, above all in western Asia Minor. Rich benefactors invested vast amounts of money into public buildings, festivals, banquets, gymnasium education and the other public goods that were seen as central to the civilized functioning of any Greek community. The cities had their own active political institutions, and competed among themselves for dominance in their own regions. All of this is attested in the rich epigraphical record, consisting of thousands and thousands of surviving inscriptions, many of which were originally set up to honor benefactors and to preserve the memory of important civic events. Great orators, too, were viewed as prestigious adornments for their home cities. And even if many of them preferred to remove themselves from the day-to-day grind of public life, it is also clear that others found that their rhetorical skills had a very practical usefulness in the institutions of the city, or in representing the interests of the city on embassies.
Perhaps the single most important example is Dio Chrysostom (cf. Edwards ch. 13, 214–5). Dio was an orator and philosopher from the town of Prusa in Bithynia (northwest Turkey). He was roughly contemporary with Plutarch (approximately 40–120 CE). His work too, like most of the authors discussed in this chapter, was remarkably wide-ranging, including speeches of political advice (including a set of four Kingship Orations, which may have been addressed to the emperor Trajan), philosophical essays, fictional dialogues, accounts of his travels and works of literary criticism. After what he represents as a period of exile imposed by the emperor Domitian (although the reliability of his account is questioned: Moles 1978), he returned to his home city to play a more active role in civic politics. We have roughly 20 surviving speeches by him addressed to the city of Prusa or to other cities of the Greek world, offering advice on civic harmony and a range of other issues. Even in these political speeches he often takes on a philosophical pose, deploying a distinctly moralizing conception of what is admirable civic practice, and portraying himself as an adviser who sees the right path all the more clearly through having a measure of philosophical detachment. In that sense he has a certain amount in common with Philostratus’ sophists, who treat whole cities as their equals or even their inferiors (although they generally lack Dio’s philosophical perspective – Dio is included in Lives of the Sophists 1.7 in the category of those who are too philosophical to be classed as sophists properly speaking in Philostratus’ view, even though they were widely viewed as such). Moreover some of Dio’s works offer a distinctively negative impression of city life: the most famous and most complex example is his Euboian Oration (or. 7), which describes his experience of suffering shipwreck on the island of Euboia, and the hospitality he receives from a rustic hunter and his family. The hunter describes how he has recently visited the city, for only the second time in his life, only to find himself being accused, absurdly, of not paying taxes. His description of the noisy and fickle mob, going through the motions of democratic politics before the eyes of the bewildered hunter, must have been meant as a comical and perhaps slightly depressing take on the institutions of democratic debate that were familiar to Dio’s contemporary readers. Moreover, the city, along with its surrounding countryside, is described in a state of physical decline, with sheep and cattle grazing in the agora (this passage has in the past been used to support the idea that the populations and economies of the cities of mainland Greece went into decline under Roman rule – that view is now discredited: see Alcock 1993, esp. 29–30 and 85–6 on the Euboian Oration). The second half of the work then goes into a diatribe denouncing the kinds of employment which are available in the cities of the Roman Empire for the urban poor. In many of Dio’s advice speeches there is similarly strongly worded criticism of the addressees (for example in Oration 31 criticizing the people of Rhodes for their habit of engraving new names on old honorific statues; in Oration 32, criticizing the people of Alexandria for their disorderly conduct as spectators at theatrical performances and athletic contests; and so on).
However the very fact that Dio puts so much energy into correction of these bad habits suggests that he feels the traditions of civic life are worth fighting for (see Desideri 2000 for the argument that Dio’s portrayals of civic life became increasingly positive as his career went on, and that this change coincided with increasingly high valuation of city life by Greek intellectuals more broadly; also Salmeri 2000). All of these speeches reveal an intricate and respectful knowledge of the particular history and circumstances of the city he is addressing. He also returns again and again to an idealized generic view of what an ideal city should have to show for itself. In or. 31.102, for example, even as he accuses the Rhodians of not living up to the virtue of their ancestors, he also reminds them in passing that those same ancestors “spent money on all the things you spend it on now – on their festivals, processions, sacrifices, fortifications, jury service, Council.” That reminder portrays the landscape of civic practice as a highly traditional, stable phenomenon surviving directly from the classical past into the present (see Ma 2000 on the way in which even the negative portrayal of democracy in action in the Euboian Oration implies the continued thriving of traditional democratic institutions in the Roman period). In addition, his speeches conjure up for us a world where cities are measured constantly against each other – the city in the Imperial Greek imagination was never an isolated island, but instead one of a long and glittering chain of comparable communities whose shared values were manifested precisely through their mutual rivalry. It is clear too that Dio himself was closely involved in the intricate details of day-to-day politics within his home city of Prusa, and that he invested a great deal of money and energy in architectural improvements. We know that not just from his own speeches, but also from a pair of letters between Pliny the Younger, as governor of Bithynia, and the emperor Trajan, discussing the problem of how to treat an accusation of misconduct brought against Dio by one of his fellow citizens in relation to one of the building projects he had undertaken on behalf of the city (Pliny, Letters 10.81–2).
Plutarch, Dio’s near contemporary, is also an important point of reference. As I have already suggested, many of Plutarch’s works have an air of timelessness to them, in the sense that they draw heavily on traditional philosophical, literary and historical material. However, his essays of practical philosophical advice are actually very unusual within the philosophical tradition for being so closely engaged with the realities of day-to-day political life, as Lieve Van Hoof has recently shown (Van Hoof 2010): they are generally addressed to named, politically active addressees; they assume that their readers are busy men who have limited time and need a pragmatic summary rather than a professional philosophical treatise; and rather than dismissing worldly concerns with honor Plutarch accommodates them and redirects them. In her reading of Plutarch’s On Exile, for example, she shows how Plutarch not only sympathizes with worries about the dishonor which results from exile, but also reassures his readers that exile may be a chance to extend and enhance one’s honor rather than the opposite; this sets him apart from other philosophical writers on exile who console the reader by arguing that political honor is worthless. One work, On Precepts of Statescraft, goes further, offering detailed advice about political conduct aimed at the young man who is about to enter civic life: it has much in common with the work of Dio (see Swain 1996, 162–83; also Jones 1971, 110–21 for Plutarch’s political writings more broadly). Plutarch himself must have had considerable experience of local politics, even if he chooses for the most part not to describe his own involvement: he spent most of his career in his small home town of Chaironeia in Boiotia in northern Greece.
Many other texts, too, deal with civic life, even if few of them can match the kind of detailed engagement we find in the work of Dio and in Plutarch’s Precepts. The genre of the speech in praise of a city is widespread, and we even find instructions for composing this kind of speech in the work of the (third-century) rhetorical writer Menander Rhetor (see Russell and Wilson 1981). Aelius Aristides’ speeches in praise of Athens (Panathenaicus) and Rome (On Rome) are particularly elaborate examples of that genre, as is Favorinus’ Corinthian Oration (although Favorinus pointedly undermines the encomiastic atmosphere through his criticisms of the Corinthians for taking down the statue they had previously put up in his honor – in that sense he is close to Dio who similarly mixes encomium with criticism).
The historiographical writing of the Roman Empire, too, contributed to civic self-perception, by helping to foster an awareness of the role individual cities had played in the great events of the Greek past. And there was also a long tradition specifically of local history stretching right back to classical Greek culture (see Clarke 2008). One of its most developed and original manifestations is in the Periegesis of Pausanias (see Hutton 2005), which describes in astonishing detail the buildings and statues of cities of mainland Greece and the stories lying behind them. Pausanias is of course very different from writers like Dio and Plutarch in his portrayal of civic identity – designedly so – since the identity he is interested in is nearly always focused on the past, and very rarely involves any mention of the contemporaries he meets on his travels or of contemporary political practice. Nevertheless it is worth remembering that the kinds of mythical and historical events he records were themselves actively celebrated in the festivals of these cities, as living parts of their identity in the present day.
Finally the image of the city was important also for the novelistic writing of the Roman period. Most strikingly, even the earliest of the surviving Greek novels (cf. Tilg, ch. 16 in this volume), Chariton’s Chaireas and Callirhoe (see above for a possible date in the mid-first century), ends with a scene of the hero and heroine being welcomed back by their home city of Syracuse after their travels and tribulations and taking their place as leading members of the civic elite. Chariton’s novel is set in the Sicily of the fifth century BCE, but many commentators have assumed nonetheless that this image of final absorption back into the life of the city, with its validation of marriage as an ideal state, would have had appealed directly to the elites of the Roman Empire, who would have viewed the hero and heroine as models for their own lives (see esp. Swain 1996, 101–31; but also more recently Whitmarsh 2011, who stresses the fact that closure is always in tension with open-endedness in the novels). More generally speaking, most of the Greek novels revel in their own geographical richness, whisking us around the Mediterranean world (and even beyond the margins of Greek speaking territory) to glimpse the landscapes of a very wide range of different cities. In that sense, like the Lives of the Sophists, and even like some early Christian texts – most obviously the canonical Acts of the Apostles, which charts the journeys of the apostles to an enormous range of cities in quasi-novelistic fashion – they appeal to a sense of geographical fantasy, allowing us to see with our own eyes the glory, or in some cases (like the Onos of Pseudo-Lucian, which describes the humiliating adventures of a man who is turned into a donkey and dragged by successive owners through the towns of mainland Greece) the squalor of the cities of the Mediterranean world, each of which had its own distinct identity and history.
How, finally, did Rome (cf. Hose, this volume, ch. 21, pp. 335–7) – the most scrutinized of all the cities of the Roman Empire – influence and shape “Imperial” Greek literature? And how were Romans and their relationship with Greek culture and identity represented by Imperial Greek authors?
There are different ways of answering those questions. Many commentators have stressed the insulation of Greek literature and culture from the realities of the Roman present. For example, the interest in looking back to the pre-Roman past, common in so many different types of Imperial Greek texts, has often been represented as a reaction to the political disempowerment of the Roman present (e.g., Bowie 1974). From a very similar perspective, Simon Swain has mapped out Greek attitudes to Rome in this period at length, right through the long second century, emphasizing the way in which traditional Greek identity tended to be envisaged as something distinct and separable from Roman affiliation (Swain 1996). Others have stressed more the compatibility of Greek identity with Roman citizenship and Roman political involvement, assuming the development of a more and more unified, empire-wide Greco-Roman elite through the second century CE and into the early third (e.g., Bowersock 1969; and more recently Madsen 2009). Tim Whitmarsh ( 2001 ) has tried to nuance these approaches by demonstrating that the texts of this period take a very complex, often playful approach to Greek identity and Roman rule, performing and experimenting with different models of what it means to be Greek or Roman, rather than simply defining those terms in clear-cut and monolithic ways.
Those approaches do not always coincide in their interpretations of particular passages or authors, but where they do agree is in the assumption that exploration and celebration of Greek identity was one of the guiding obsessions of Imperial Greek literature, and moreover that it was partly shaped by the encounter with Rome. Some have gone even further in arguing for the influence of Rome on Imperial Greek culture. Most recently, A. J. S. Spawforth ( 2012 ) has argued that many features of Greek culture in the Imperial period were in fact due to a deliberate policy of encouraging classicizing images of Greek identity on the part of Augustus and his advisers, with the aim of creating an image of Greek identity compatible with the moral priorities they particularly valued for Roman culture. He argues also that this process was further enhanced by later emperors, Hadrian in particular. On that argument, the idealization of classical Athenian and mainland Greek history and culture, and many other features which we see as archetypally associated with late Greek culture – for example the thriving Greek festival culture of the Roman empire (e.g., see Spawforth 2012, 163–7 on Olympia), or the culture of rhetorical declamation (Spawforth 2012, 73–81) – turn out to have been brought into being at least partly as a consequence of Augustan policy and in response to Roman cultural priorities. Spawforth’s argument presents us with a remarkable picture which will no doubt prompt reassessment of much of what we thought we knew about Imperial Greek culture. But even if we choose not to accept his argument in full, it is undeniable that it was Roman rule that made possible much of what is most distinctive in the Greek literature and culture of this period: the cosmopolitan intellectual culture and thriving city life already outlined in this chapter were distinctive consequences of the wealth and interconnectedness of the Roman world. For example, the evidence for Hadrian’s financial investment in bolstering Athens’ prestige as a cultural center in the second century has long been clear (e.g., see Boatwright 2000, 144–57). Some scholars have suggested that the most important function of sophistic orators was not so much their cultural role but rather their role as ambassadors who would give speeches on behalf of cities before the emperor, and as imperial administrators (see especially Bowersock 1969, and response by Bowie 1982). On that argument, sophistic rhetoric is a good example of the way in which Greek cultural activity could be sustained at least in part by Roman political realities. It is even tempting to feel that the subjection of Greece to Roman rule made it easier to contemplate the Greek world as a unity, with a shared Panhellenic history (Elsner 1992, 17–20 makes that argument for Pausanias, while acknowledging at the same time the way in which Pausanias shuts Rome out of his account of the Greek landscape and Greek history).
When we turn to the texts themselves, we see a very wide spectrum of different possibilities for representing Rome and its relationship with Greek culture. In some cases we even find a range of approaches in tension with each other within a single text. In order to illustrate that point I want to look first, once again, at Philostratus’ Lives of the Sophists. I aim to show how that text oscillates between, on the one hand, a conception of sophistic oratory as an activity which is intimately and even uncomfortably entwined with Roman rule and Roman emperors, and on the other hand a conception where Rome is utterly and ostentatiously absent. It is perhaps not surprising that modern scholarship has used both of those models, when they are already in tension with each other within one of the most influential of all texts for our understanding of this period (see Kemezis 2011, 17 for a similar point).
Let us look first at the absence of Rome. One striking instance comes in Philostratus’ account of the origins of sophistic oratory. He traces it right back to the sophists of the classical period (VS 480–82), identifying an “old sophistic”, which is described only briefly, and then suggesting that a “second sophistic,” associated with distinctive choices of theme and characterization, was founded by the orator Aeschines in the fourth century BCE (that term “Second Sophistic” has often used in modern scholarship, in a misleading extension of Philostratus’ usage, as a shorthand for the Greek literature of the long second century CE as a whole). From there Philostratus jumps abruptly forward, by about 400 years, to the career of Niketes of Smyrna, an orator of the mid first century CE (VS 1.19, 511–12). In making that move he is not untypical of his contemporaries, who delight in drawing links across the centuries between the present day and the classical past. But it is nevertheless remarkable to see what Philostratus misses out. The background of radical political and cultural change, and the whole complex history of Greek rhetoric and its relationship with growing Roman power in the late Hellenistic and Augustan period, are omitted (barring a couple of cursory mentions – for example Philostratus the Egyptian in 1.5, 486, who is said to have associated with Cleopatra, and Theomnestus of Naucratis in 1.6, 486, who may have been active in Athens in the first century BCE). If Spawforth’s account is right (see above), this omission of the formative influence of Augustan Rome on Greek declamatory practices leads to a highly misleading account of where the sophistic declamation of the long second century came from. In the opening sentences of Niketes’ life Philostratus acknowledges that the continuity between Niketes and Aeschines four centuries before is not completely smooth – there has been a gap between past and present: “For this man Niketes, having inherited the art of oratory reduced to a meagre state, gave it approaches much more splendid than the ones he himself built for Smyrna.” He acknowledges, in other words that Niketes’ career is the start of something new, and he hints that it may have taken place in parallel with a new momentum within Greek city life, by his mention of Niketes’ civic benefactions. But Rome at first does not seem to be part of the story: this is a purely Greek affair.
Philostratus also repeatedly conjures up the image of an idealized audience of Greeks. For one thing he refers repeatedly to the long-standing traditions of orators speaking to the assembled Greeks at the Olympics and other Panhellenic festivals. Those traditions stretch right back to the Classical period, but Philostratus also gives lots of examples of the sophists of the long second century doing the same thing. For example at 2.27, 618, Philostratus tells us that the sophist Hippodromus “did not neglect attendance at the festivals of the Greeks, but went to them regularly, both in order to declaim and so as not to be forgotten.” Not only that, but Philostratus also uses many of the same motifs even outside specific festival settings. His sophists are repeatedly described as speaking to “the Greeks” even when they are not performing at Olympia or Delphi or other equivalent venues. For Philostratus, in other words, one of the defining features of sophistic speech seems to be the fact that it has a notionally festive, Panhellenic quality. For example, the students and admirers of the sophists are often referred to as “Hellenes” or “Hellenic” or even “Hellas” (i.e. Greece). In 2.10, 587 we hear that the sophist Hadrian of Tyre, holder of the chair of rhetoric in Athens, “whenever he had lectured went home again as an object of envy, escorted by Greeks from everywhere (τοῦ παντάχοθεν ῾00395λληνικοῦ)”. He wins reverence, too, “by his sharing in Hellenic festivals”; and they (i.e. the Hellenic youth) feel towards him “as sons do to a father who is pleasant and gentle, and who maintains with them the Hellenic dance.” Between them these passages give us a remarkable image of the sophist surrounded at all times by an audience which notionally represents the whole of Greece, defined according to traditional festive criteria of the kind that Herodotus refers to in the famous passage in Histories 8.144, where the Athenians appeal for unity against the Persian threat by appealing to the shared “shrines and sacrifices” of the Greeks (τὸ Ἑλληνικόν – the same almost untranslatable word used by Philostratus for “Greeks” or “Greek culture” or “Greekness” in the passage just quoted and elsewhere), as well as their shared lifestyle and language and blood.
In other sections of the work, however, we find a very different picture, and the text suggests instead that the Imperial court is the audience that really matters. Often these relationships with Roman power appear quite dysfunctional, as sophists win favor or cause offence in unpredictable ways in the presence of capricious emperors. I suggested a moment ago that Niketes of Smyrna, the first of Philostratus’ modern sophists, at first sight stands for an ideal of revived continuity between Greek past and Greek present, and that is indeed the impression we get from the opening page or so of his mini-biography. That impression is abruptly undermined, however, as Rome intrudes in the second half of Philostratus’ short account of Niketes’ life. There we hear how the emperor Nero summoned him from Smyrna in Asia Minor all the way to Gaul, so that he could defend himself against a vastly disproportionate charge of having insulted a consular official (VS 1.19, 512). In that anecdote Philostratus gives us the most vivid illustration imaginable of the way in which the Roman emperors do after all control the sophistic world, at least in some respects. And it is a common pattern in everything that follows that Philostratus will switch from long passages of depoliticized literary analysis, which celebrate the autonomy and antiquity of the sophistic profession, to accounts of the interference of the political sphere, which show that Rome has the power to command and impel the sophists in its own directions, according to its own whims.
Often, of course, we find more harmonious models of the interaction between Greek and Roman. Right back to the late Hellenistic period Greek authors had sought to show the compatibility of Roman rule with Greek culture, often in a rather condescending fashion, for example by stressing the need for Greek knowledge to guide and civilize its Roman conquerors. One of the most famous early examples is Dionysius of Halicarnassus’ Roman Antiquities, where he argues at length for the Greek origins of Rome and Roman culture (see Tsakmakis, this volume, ch. 14, pp. 226–7). There are many similar examples from later centuries too. For example Aelius Aristides, in his speech To Rome already mentioned, praises the city of Rome according to templates derived from traditionally Greek civic encomium, and represents Roman rule as the thing which enables prosperity and cultural flourishing for all inhabitants of the empire (for example see On Rome 97–9 for the idea that Roman rule has enabled the flourishing of traditional Greek festival culture; that said, Aristides largely refrains from emphasizing the idea of Greekness in his depiction of the empire’s culture, since his key point of praise is the way in which Rome has created a world where distinctions of ethnicity have become almost irrelevant, where all are common citizen: see Richter 2011, 131–4). Plutarch portrays many virtuous and admirable Roman politicians in his Parallel Lives, – in fact in many cases they measure up relatively favorably against the famous Greeks with whom they are paired – but he also makes clear the important civilizing influence of Greek education on those Romans who choose to devote themselves to it (see Swain 1990). Similarly in his Sympotic Questions he regularly shows us his powerful Roman friends like Sosius Senecio and Mestrius Florus, both of whom held the consulship, taking part as equals in erudite conversation with his fellow guests, but he also makes it clear that they are to be admired here precisely because they are immersing themselves in Greek learning: Greek culture is the dominant force in this relationship. Even in Philostratus’ Lives of the Sophists we do find ever so often a more positive image of the civilized, mutually respectful relations between Greek learning and Roman power, particularly in the preface (479–80) where Philostratus recalls an earlier conversation about sophistry between himself and his dedicatee, the future emperor Gordian, as if advertising his own ability to transcend the difficulties so many of his sophistic predecessors had in their relations with the imperial family.
Other authors, however, offer a more cynical version of this kind of interconnectedness between Greek and Roman culture. The work of Lucian is an obvious place to look, particularly his text On Salaried Posts already mentioned, and another closely related work the Nigrinus. In these works Lucian offers a bitter criticism of the Roman patronage system and its corroding effects on the trust and intellectual integrity that should lie at the heart of Greek intellectual and civic life. At the same time, however, he shows us Greek characters who are themselves complicit in their own humiliation, led by their greed into positions almost of servitude. He also stresses how the powerful Roman and the learned Greek are held together by a dynamic relationship of mutual need: each needs the other as a badge of his own status, mired as they are in a world where self-presentation and social position count for everything:
My view, however, is that the flatterers are more of a disgrace than those who are flattered; in fact the flatterers are almost responsible for the arrogance of the flattered. For when they express admiration for these men’s wealth, and praise their gold, and crowd into their gateways early in the morning, and come up to them and address them as if they were masters, what else should we expect them to think? But if by common agreement they were to abstain, even for a little while, from this voluntary slavery, do you not think on the contrary that the rich men would come to the doors of beggars, imploring them not to leave their wealth unviewed and unwitnessed, not to allow the beauty of their tables and the size of their houses to remain pointless and unappreciated. For what they are in love with is not being rich, but being admired for being rich. The truth is, a very beautiful house is of no use to the inhabitant, nor is gold and ivory, unless there is someone to admire them (Nigrinus 23).
That image undermines the work done by Plutarch and others in presenting images of civilized harmony between Greece and Rome; it exposes the easy co-operation between Greeks and Romans from the Sympotic Questions and other similar works as an elitist fantasy, unconnected with the more squalid reality on the ground. But it is striking that even as it does so it still replicates (albeit in degraded form) those Plutarchan assumptions about the compatibility and interdependence of Greeks and Romans within the Imperial world. Some writers did indeed ignore the Roman present by giving all their attention to the Classical past (and that goes for Lucian himself in much of his work). But we can never look too far in Imperial Greek literature without finding at least some hint of the mutual impact of Roman and Greek culture, and even of their mutual necessity.
Many of the key publications over the last few decades have focused on the theme of identity, and its connection with the classicizing character of Imperial Greek literature. For example, Bowie 1974 has been an influential starting-point for many later studies: he demonstrates the prevalence of classicizing themes within Imperial Greek texts of many different types, and sees this focus on the glorious Greek past as a reaction to political disempowerment; Swain 1996 maps out Greek attitudes to Rome in the literature of the late first to early third centuries CE, and argues for the continuing power of Greek identity as distinguished from Roman; Schmitz 1997 explains the obsession with archaizing paideia in Imperial Greek culture by its role as a marker of social distinction; Whitmarsh 2001 stresses the complexity of Imperial Greek representations of identity, as something which is acted out within the experience of writing and reading, rather than something fixed and monolithic (and see Goldhill 2001 for a collection of essays many of which argue along similar lines). Other important works have focused closely on the sophists, and on Philostratus’ account of them. For example, Bowersock 1969 has mapped out the role of Greek sophists within the day-to-day life of the Roman world; Gleason 1995 offers a vivid portrait of two of the great sophists of the second century, Polemo and Favorinus, and of their rivalry; Whitmarsh 2005 is a good brief introduction to sophistic oratory in this period. Jones 1971, 1978 and 1986 demonstrates in depth the connections Plutarch, Dio, and Lucian have with the political and cultural figures and events around them. König 2009 is intended to offer basic orientation in the key texts and authors of Imperial Greek literature more broadly defined, including brief discussion of links with early Christian writing in that period. More focused studies on individual authors, texts and themes are far too numerous to list here. The Cambridge University Press monograph series “Greek Culture in the Roman World” covers a very wide range of topics. Schmitz and Wiater 2012 is a collection of essays that offer between them an overview of the Greek literature of the late Hellenistic world, and its connection with themes (especially the theme of identity) which had renewed importance in later centuries.